↑ 1.01.1Neẓāmī." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Feb. 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/413374/Nezami> excerpt: Greatest romantic epic poet in Persian Literature, who brought a colloquial and realistic style to the Persian epic. .... Nezami is admired in Persian-speaking lands for his originality and clarity of style, though his love of language for its own sake and of philosophical and scientific learning makes his work difficult for the average reader.

↑ 2.02.12.22.32.4C. A. (Charles Ambrose) Storey and François de Blois (2004), "Persian Literature – A Biobibliographical Survey: Volume V Poetry of the Pre-Mongol Period.", RoutledgeCurzon; 2nd revised edition (June 21, 2004). ISBN 0-947593-47-0. p. 363: "Nizami Ganja’i, whose personal name was Ilyas, is the most celebrated native poet of the Persians after Firdausi. His nisbah designates him as a native of Ganja (Elizavetpol, Kirovabad) in Azerbaijan, then still a country with an Iranian population, and he spent the whole of his life in Transcaucasia; the verse in some of his poetic works which makes him a native of the hinterland of Qom is a spurious interpolation." [1] (p. 438 of Amazon link).

↑ 3.03.1Meisami, Julie Scott (1995). The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance. Oxford University Press. Abû Muhammad Ilyas ibn Yusuf ibn Zaki Mu'ayyad, known by his pen-name of Nizami, was born around 1141 in Ganja, the capital of Arran in Transcaucasian Azerbaijan, where he remained until his death in about 1209. His father, who had migrated to Ganja from Qom in north central Iran, may have been a civil servant; his mother was a daughter of a Kurdish chieftain; having lost both parents early in his life, Nizami was brought up by an uncle. He was married three times, and in his poems laments the death of each of his wives, as well as proferring advice to his son Muhammad. He lived in an age of both political instability and intense intellectual activity, which his poems reflect; but little is known about his life, his relations with his patrons, or the precise dates of his works, as the accounts of later biographers are colored by the many legends built up around the poet

↑Mo'in, Muhammad(2006), "Tahlil-i Haft Paykar-i Nezami", Tehran.: p. 2: Some commentators have mentioned his name as “Ilyas the son of Yusuf the son of Zakki the son of Mua’yyad” while others have mentioned that Mu’ayyad is a title for Zakki. Mohammad Moin, rejects the first interpretation claiming that if it were to mean 'Zakki son of Muayyad' it should have been read as 'Zakki i Muayyad' where izafe (-i-) shows the son-parent relationship but here it is 'Zakki Muayyad' and Zakki ends in silence/stop and there is no izafe (-i-). Some may argue that izafe is dropped due to meter constraints but dropping parenthood izafe is very strange and rare. So it is possible that Muayyad was a sobriquet for Zaki or part of his name (like Muayyad al-Din Zaki). This is supported by the fact that later biographers also state Yusuf was the son of Mu’ayyad

↑Bernard Lewis, “Music of a distant drum”, Princeton University Press, 2001. Pg 9: “The Persians went a step further, creating authentic epic tradition comparables with those of Greece, Rome and the Vikings. This too, became in time, a form of Persian national self definition. The most famous of Persian epic poets, Firdawsi (940–1020) has been translated several times. An extract from the story of Farhad and Shirin, as told by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami, exmpelified another form of narrative”

↑Julie Scott Meisami, Paul Starkeym, “Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature”, Taylor & Francis, 1998. Pg 69:“In Arabic literature there has been no artistic elaboration of the story comparable to that undertaken by the Persian poet Nizami “

↑Jan Rypka (Rypka, Jan. ‘Poets and Prose Writers of the Late Saljuq and Mongol Periods’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5, The Saljuq and Mongol Periods, ed., Published January 1968. p. 578: As the scene of the greatest flowering of the panegyrical qasida, southern Caucasia occupies a prominent place in New Persian literary history. But this region also gave to the world Persia’s finest creator of romantic epics. Hakim Jamal al-din Abu Muhammad Ilyas b. Yusuf b. Zaki b. Mu’ayyad Nizami a native of Ganja in Azarbaijan, is an unrivaled master of thoughts and words, a poet whose freshness and vigor all the succeeding centuries have been unable to dull. Little is known of his life, the only source being his own works, which in many cases provided no reliable information. We can only deduce that he was born between 535 and 540 (1140–46) and that his background was urban. Modern Azarbaijan is exceedingly proud of its world famous son and insists that he was not just a native of the region, but that he came from its own Turkic stock. At all events his mother was of Iranian origin, the poet himself calling her Ra’isa and describing her as Kurdish.